


Today's not yesterday

by gloss



Category: Captain America, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos
Genre: Chromatic Character, F/M, Jazz - Freeform, Second Chances
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-26
Updated: 2012-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-30 04:27:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/327716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy's not a ghost; Gabe's done more than merely survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Today's not yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: Title from "Visions", Stevie Wonder. Beta by Jube. 
> 
> 09-01-2007

  


Her people love Peggy, it's clear. They treat her like a fragile thing, already broken too many times to risk any more. They love her as what she used to be. She is a figment of their memory, maybe even their imagination. Even Cap speaks to her carefully, his eyes downcast and mouth tightened.

None of this makes any sense to Gabe. 

Peggy reminds him of many women he knew in the war -- Marie Lebrave with her jaunty red cap and foghorn voice, and Bucky's girl, the German, Gretel or Gretchen, her eyes as fierce as the kid's own. She reminds him, sure, but that's just what happens when you've lived this long. Everyone reminds him of someone else. He doesn't see the ghost who haunts the others. 

When she flips him during a training spar, she laughs in victory, tossing back her hair, planting her fists on her hips. There's no ghost anywhere near. He sees a beautiful, dangerous woman, wearing the SHIELD catsuit like it's something tailor-made out of Paris just for her. Her strong frame and quickly-firming muscles reveal the other new recruits for the *girls* they are, scrawny as twigs, chirpy as sparrows.

Fury and Dugan call Gabe "schoolmarm" and "mama duck" for it, but he enjoys training the new recruits. He doesn't shriek and bluster -- Happy Sam Sawyer's tough-as-nails legacy has no place in his gym. Gabe teaches as he plays, drawing on what's already in the air, changing it up, prolonging it, expecting more and more, refusing to fear the inevitable cracks. 

The cracks will come; they're not the end of the world.

He should have been done with this life long ago. He keeps fighting, not just because Fury expects him to (though that's a reason that's impossible to discount). He should be a high-school music teacher by now, or an insurance salesman. His mother always hoped he'd go into sales. Carla believed he'd quit SHIELD, once they were engaged, go straight; it wasn't the only reason they didn't work out, but it was a big one.

He doesn't have an answer for what he's still doing here, why he's still putting up with Fury, playing what gigs he can make and sitting in on any session that will have him. The war, he thinks, has something to do with it, jangled him up so bad he never, quite, learned to settle. But look at Reb and Iz, even Dino -- they're out of it, off living normal and free. 

Maybe he ought to do the same. It's getting late, though. No one wants a man in his late forties selling them Fuller Brushes or mortgage insurance. Working for Fury, it's where he belongs. Lets him believe they came through the war for a good reason. They survived, maybe, due to more than blind luck.

Peggy's got nightmare behind her eyes, same as Gabe does. Still and all, she fights hard, rises to the top of the class. When she manages to flatten Quartermain, no one's going to claim she's a pity hire any longer.

And then she turns up here, at tonight's gig, looking like the finest lady Gabe's seen in a dog's age. Wrapped up in a black shift that sets off her muscled arms and full breasts, she moves through the club like she owns the place. She does.

"Your hair --" he says when the set's done and he's edged all the way to the back, to her table. He kisses the air over her cheek as Peggy smiles.

She's cut her hair and colored it. In the dim club, it looks like mahogany and oak, dark and rich as whiskey; when she turns her head and a few strands tickle his face, they smell light as spring.

She smoothes the hair back behind her ear. "Only the Countess can pull off white hair."

He hears music in her voice -- Virginian lilt, Parisian speed, hoarseness from decades of disuse. She talks to him about the band's set, tells tales of sneaking out to jitterbug the night away as a girl.

"Why, Miss Carter..."

She holds up a finger. "Please, Ms."

She has taken, fiercely, to women's lib and civil rights, even gay lib, as if she'd been _waiting_ for the rest of the world to catch up to her sense of justice. Fury told him to keep an eye on her pinko leanings; Gabe, however, isn't worried so much as charmed.

" _Ms._ Carter," he says, dipping his head. "Dancing with strange men? Drinking moonshine? I never dreamed that you would...socialize below your station." 

She _is_ a Southern lady, after all. Whenever Gabe recalls that fact, he smells the tang of floor-polish ground into his mother's knees, the crackle of starch on her palms. It's just five years or so since her homestate was forced to let someone like him marry someone like her.

If there is anyone like her.

Peggy's eyes narrow as she covers his hand with her own. "I never have. Nor do I intend to start now."

Gabe is much too old for this. He's long past looking for any kind of love, but if the war taught him anything, it's the importance of comrades. He turns his hand, palm-up, and laces his fingers through hers. 

"Those were the bad old days." She rises from her seat, still clasping his hand. "Best left behind, don't you think?"

Left behind, but neither of them can forget. They're not young, no longer foolish enough to try and forget.

They stroll arm-in-arm from club at 55th and Third toward his apartment in Kips Bay. They pause across the street from the U.N. and her grip tightens on his arm. Her profile is strong as a statue's, Roman or older, as she gazes at the complex.

Outside his building, Gabe pauses with his hand on the front door. His keys tinkle. "Sure you want to come up?"

Peggy's hair blows back. She levels her gaze on him. "Are you concerned about my _reputation_ , Mr. Jones?"

His face stings with heat.

Expression softening, she leans against him.

After a moment, he pulls open the door and she passes inside, her sensible heels clicking on the tiles.

At home, he pours her a drink and takes two for himself. She sits on the floor, shoes off and legs folded behind her, while he puts Kind of Blue on the turntable. She played flute and piano throughout her childhood, all the way up to the day she ran away to the Resistance. So he could explain the harmonic innovations of bebop, those sounds that clattered through him after V-E Day, ravens in an empty room. The music jangled him right up with adrenaline and never let him forget to fight, pushed him back into living and clung to him more insistently than any woman.

He could explain, and he will. Just now, they listen without speaking.

When Evans's piano throbs down into silence, Gabe rises again and flips the disc. Peggy comes with him. Her fingers dance at her sides with the start of "All Blues" in time with Coltrane's honey-stuttering sax and she sketches out a quick move in her bare feet.

"Can't really dance to it," he tells her. "It's music for listening, not..."

She presses back against him, dancing in place, with quick, small movements that trail through the air long after she's moved on. Miles's horn brightens her shifts as his hands find the full curves of her hips. His face dips into the warmth at the nape of her neck. She's laughing now, lowly, chromatic and unexpected as the music, tremble-dancing in his arms.

She twists her head, rests her cheek against his. "Can't let _that_ stop us."

They're too old to fool themselves. They've both lived too long to do anything but grab this chance.


End file.
